Month: June 2015

So life. Unfolding, unfolding, unfolding. Bringing tears to my eyes and wind to my sails and this amazing fruition to the forefront of my eyes. To see equality, to see the tides turn, to see the world stepping towards that great horizon where our greater selves live. To rake in the magic of the world with open hands and open hearts. I am proud. I am happy, so happy. I am a silent prayer pressing under the skin of this country. I am thankful, thankful. Grateful. And watching the world unfold…somehow much faster than I could have ever imagined.

Life is soft. Beautiful and tumultuous. So much has happened in the past 6 weeks I can hardly comprehend it. So much flipped on its head. I’m still walking. I’m still holding Jamie in my arms. I’m still breathing. Life beats on. I don’t know how to swim out of this place or when I will…but I will. I miss Kara. I miss a great deal about how life was 2 months ago. But I’m still here. And I’ve still got worlds to discover.

Summer warmth and summer smell and summer storms are starting to leak into my skin. The earth is finding its own tenor to sing in. I’m letting the light back in. I am loving being a photographer. I am bizarrely loving running Terhune’s instagram. I was just desperate for this creative outlet. It is far more satisfying than I could have expected. I still have so many other things I wish I could do…but with Jamie I have about 15 minutes of free time within the day for myself. It’s ok, it’s ok. I love it. And it is precious time. So precious and small, these hours I get with him in my life. These hours when he is wide-eyed and completely consumed by wonder. I wish I could capture that spark that lives in a child’s eye and keep it alive in the adults I know. It is a terribly heartbreaking thing to lose. I suppose we mothers always secretly imagine that if we do the right things, at the right times, with the right love and intention, that we can keep that light aflame within our children’s eyes forever. I know it is a foolish dream. But I do wish to one day live in a world where this is not a foolish dream and where adults can have a complex understanding of the world that makes room for all sides of the coin – the good, the bad, the magic, the wonder, the tragedy, the heartbreak. And keep it all, cherish it all, honor it all. A world where adults honor that light within their children’s eyes and keep it alive within their waking, mature life alongside responsibility and disappointment and heartbreak. Understand its value and its place and keep it all, keep it all, keep it all. Honor the magic in life.

I don’t want much. I just want the sky and the earth and the space between. I want someone to want me. Wholly, completely, captivatingly. The tiny crevices and the raw bones. I want my poetry to slide in and out of someone’s spine. I want connection. I want raw soul on soul on soul on soul. I want magic. I want to feel respected. I want someone to walk through this life with me, in awe and wonder at the blazing earth around us. I want adventure. Romance. Fire. I want to be more than what I am now. Just someone’s wife. I want silence and space and recognition. Of what I am, of what I am doing, of what I have created and what I will continue to create around you. I want to be viewed as a whole and full human being with needs and desires that range and vary. I want it to be understood that I have a complex array of relationships and networks of people that all find ways of fulfilling me. And that all of those relationships must be respected in their own right. And that to be a full person, I have many facets and many edges and many people that work towards satisfying what it is to interact in a world full of other people. I want someone who gives a shit about my pleasure. I want someone who recognizes that motherhood is a full time job. That it is powerful, important, empowering…and creating the world we are walking in to. I want far fewer power struggles, far less competition…and far more recognition that each person in a relationship has something to contribute, has endless worlds in their minds and endless ways to grow, to adapt, to transform. That neither one can ever be better at any given time – measurement of one human against another is absolute nonsense. It all balances, it all balances, it all balances out in the end. I want to share. Thoughts, interests, passions. To have that genuine give and take. To have genuine communication. To have compromise. For someone to reflect, think it over, and apologize. For someone to hold my hand through pregnancy, birth and a baby and not layer on layers upon layers of resentment, competition and jealousy. I want someone to try. Just a little. To meet me on my level. To not be threatened by me. To not need to tear me down just to stand over me. To not be so threatened by my capabilities that they want to make me submissive and quaint and simple.

I don’t need diamonds, jewelry, material things. I don’t need any of the trite and neat bows of a surface level relationship. I just want to feel connected. Truly, deeply.

I want something real. I want someone to love me on and off the pedestal. Take me down from the high shelf, dust me off, see me as I am and understand that life is complex and rich and thick with a thousand different angles. And at the same time, keep the dream alive. Keep the magic alive. Explore this wild and whimsical world with me. Take my hand and walk beside me. Not above, below or inside out and perpendicular to me. Just walk with me. Just be present and respond to what I am giving you. As simple as that. Be here with me. To take in the sky, watch the world spin on its axis, and to open to each other’s secret worlds. And I promise, I promise…I am sure, so sure…that I could love beyond reason. Beyond doubt. With fervor and mystery and faith and a ball of fire in my eyes. I keep this dream in my heart. I could love the way they sing songs about. I could do it. I just need someone to reach out and grab the hand I am holding out. Endlessly, endlessly. Meet me where I am. Take my heart in your hands and say yes to the world. Make magic with me.

I’m sitting in a hammock swing looking up at the sunset over Terhune’s on June 24, 2015. Finally got Jamie to sleep at a reasonable hour and was able to actually go outside by myself and watch the sunset. Everything about everything is astounding.

It’s so fascinating what youth is. How the colors of the sky streak across my mind. How I have loved growing up, growing out and spinning back round to look at myself. Still, the only thing that ever really feels clear to me is childhood. I was always conscious of that as a child- how being a child seemed to fit me in some wholly existential way. Being able to live in that space, to dwell consciously on what childhood is, from the outside and the inside and to stand apart within the world of adulthood and spin myself into that effortless world of a child- that is what is true for me. What seems to make most sense in this messy, chaotic world. The adult world is full of so much bullshit. So much which is NOT life, which is not reality, which is not truth. So much nonsense staring at the walls we’ve built up around each other. I love this great contradiction – that so many seem to stand above and laugh at children, at imagination and at play…and yet build themselves strange cubicles to dive into the unreal world of furtive looks, false exchanges, imagined meanings placed on stocks and stacks of paper money. I understand reality, I do. But I don’t understand why no one sees that the only people that are actually living in real life, the way that life is meant to be lived – are children. Meaning and joy and discovery and real, honest, blunt emotion. No falsities, no imagined narratives, no walls of obligation that we have hidden ourselves behind. The professional world makes my insides churn and makes me embarrassed to be a human. Stacks and stacks and stacks upon stacks of imagined meanings. All sorts of energies being pummeled into a hole in the ground. Manifesting and creating more and more bullshit. Not all, not all, but so much of it.

So much talk today of motherhood…of how it needs to be revered. About how there should be no shame, no guilt about not being a mother. You should not become a mother if it isn’t ABSOLUTELY what you want with the deepest inner workings of your most genuine heart. It is not a light thing to the checked off a checklist. It is heavy and important and so impactful. So meaningful. It needs to be revered.

And for me, it saved my life. It has been the most fulfilling and satisfying thing I have ever engaged in. I wish every mother felt that way. I wish I could give that gift to every woman that wants to feel that way. I wish it was enough. I wish people would see that hazy, golden glow in the skin of their children. Put down the complaints, re-frame their life, live in gratitude, and mother the world…for the world needs mothering.

I can’t really believe I gave up acting for a man. I can’t really believe I have found myself in the exact situation I swore a thousand times I would never be in. It is…well…humbling. No reason to judge anyone for anything. The complexities of human choices, intentions and pathways are so rich and varied. All of those ways that you imagine it is so easy to make the right choices, to walk that clear path towards your destination, to set your intention on the horizon and not waver from its sight…it is so much more complicated than that. It is so much more complicated than that.

I watch the first star twinkle its way out of the dimming evening sky and I thank the world for still breathing its way in circles.

I like greeting my mind again after all this time. I can only see the dusty reflection of my own mind when I begin to write it out. I am always surprised by what comes out.

I remember writing. I remember sitting at a keyboard and letting words dribble from my mouth and foam up in my ribcage. I remember painting until I was so hungry I could collapse. But now I have baby arms around my neck and baby nails digging into my face and I have sweet, warm baby kisses sucking on my chin and I have this delicate, angel body draping over my lap while I write. I have soft baby breath on my skin and every night I sleep alone in a king size bed with a little baby next to me. I cuddle him and curl my arms around him and I watch him grow everyday. And it heals, and it heals, and it heals. To see a boy…so full of love and light. To hold a being that will one day be a man inside my little arms. To hold a little boy. To have him cry “Mama” a thousand times a day. It is everything. It is everything.

I am amazed at life. At transformation and at growth. I am amazed at how different I feel, and how much the same. I am amazed at the strange, straggling path my life is leading and all the unbidden turns my story is unfolding. I feel entirely right and finally in my skin being a mother…and at the same time I feel alienated and alone in my position and in my relation to others my age. I am amazed, now, looking back…at how I felt, who I was and how I acted for some strange few years. And at the time how I felt so clear. Looking back, I am so endlessly sad at how I was in Australia. It is remarkable to come out of a fog and to not understand how years went by without being able to clear it. And it is amazing to clear it. It is amazing, too, to imagine the expanse of time stretching before me – climbing this mountain of motherhood…imagining when it is that I will again be able to regain some sense of autonomy. It is amazing the sense of losing your identity and gaining it again. Motherhood has held that for me, in many ways. I dive down deep into this idea of what it is to be a mother…and then when I’m deep enough, something seems to drag me spluttering to the surface…and with a few desperate gasps of air I just start flailing about trying to make sense of the fact that I am 24 or 25 and rowing so far away from any shore all by myself. That I am all by myself out here. That I really did cut the cord and give up so much more than I ever knew I had. Sometimes I feel like I have thought through my life and what I want and what I am doing so many thousands and thousands of times and that everything fits…and then all of a sudden I suddenly look around and start wallowing in “What am I doing here?!” “How did I get here?” All semblance of things I wanted desperately just TWO years ago have vanished without a trace. So much is gone. So much can never come back. And yet there is so much to gain, so much to gather, so much to grow. So much amazement and so much to be grateful just in one finger of my baby boy.

Motherhood feels like some gauzy, dreamy ad in a magazine to me. Not all the time, but a lot of the time – that is absolutely for certain. A lot of the time I can tap into that absolute bliss of motherhood. And I can walk in that dream and savor the weight of this boy in my arms. And it is hard. And it is exhausting and consuming and so many things have had to go on the back burner. So many things. But so many things have been gained. Patience. Head space. Perspective. And sad but wonderful wisdom. Some glitter of youth and enchantment of naivety has faded with perspective, but has been replaced by that age old saying “This too shall pass.”

Marriage, however, does not feel the same. I find myself knee deep in this muck of endless, teetering, circular thoughts and I don’t know how to dig myself out of any of them…so perhaps I need to start articulating them. But it’s hard to know how to articulate…because it’s hard to know if it is marriage I have a problem with or if it is MY marriage I have a problem with. It’s easy to say that our wedding was one of the worst things we could have done for our marriage. I feel trapped. There I said it. And I wish there was a way for everything to exist at the same time. Motherhood, family, love, beauty, freedom, space, a sense of autonomy and identity. I think perhaps Kathryn Petersen has it right – a marriage, yet they consciously don’t live together. They each have their own space, and it is exciting and new to visit each other’s house. I don’t know what I want, but it isn’t this. And the problems are so deep and entrenched and complex that I have no idea how to dig myself out of them.

Life feels like an endless succession of beautiful days. Your soul sits on my shoulders and presses down. Yes, absolutely, it’s difficult to concentrate. People have filled my head with the idea that I should deserve more than what I’m getting. I vascillate between wanting to be grateful for what I have, and wanting to seize the magical life I feel lies before me somewhere on the horizon. I wonder what your part is in that. I keep being struck down by this strong hand of reality that keeps me rooted in the dirt. At the same time, I can hardly believe that that’s what reality really wants of me. It seems like a trick. Life has always pulled the curtains and doors open, just begging for me to reach for magic. And now that I am desperately trying to grasp magic, there feels to be a chill in the world all of the sudden which I have never known. A silent box closing in. Some strange little part of my mind feels like I’m being punished for something. Like if only I could just be grateful enough or present enough or not wish for more than I have. Like I’m being chastised for wanting more out of a relationship. For saying all my life that all I wanted was for someone to love me…and now that I have that…I am saying I want more. And that is shameful in some way. But it isn’t. The truth is…it isn’t. What he is giving me is not enough. And I don’t know whether it is empowering to ask for more, or greedy. I guess a lot of women would tell me it is empowering. I suppose it is only the abused part of myself that would assume that I am asking too much by asking for anything at all. Then comes that hard hand of reality closing all doors altogether saying – there is no way out from this choice you have made, this life you have built, this path you have walked yourself on to. But how was I supposed to know? People change. Having a baby changes people. Complexities develop. Power struggles grow. Suddenly I feel more alone sitting next to my husband than anywhere else in the world. How strange it is to walk up to an altar and feel a thousand things all at once.

This little heart of mine
I’m gonna let it pound
the way it does
lead me to and fro
batter me into rocks and slide me off the edge of the world

this little heart of mine
It’s always going to win.

And I will never stop finding my way to your shore
I will never stop washing up on the edge of that distant horizon
frozen in time, monumentally magicked into being
stuck in a truth far truer than now.

there is regret, but mostly there is gratitude
that a life could ever have been painted such hues,
that the secret veil of the earth could ever have been pulled back
for the slightest moment
to reveal that diamond-crusted surface of the soil
that rests beneath our sun-drenched skins

we are there, we are there,
we are always there
That’s at least one truth that never seems to split
that law of conservation of energy
that I twist and manipulate to mean
that if I pressed the toes of my soul into the ground deep enough
with enough intention
with enough commitment
and persistence
to existing inside of a moment
I believe that it would hold within it
such inextricable meaning
that the universe itself would recognize the beauty
and would hold on to it. Would lace it around the great bubbly, spherical surface
of the universe
and keep it. That it would exist in the truest sense of the word
And to exist, truly, in a state as strong as that love,
would be to exist eternally.
For love is a magic that knows no bounds.
For love is an oath to time.
For love is a promise that beats with the heart of the stars.
For love is still there, waiting on a hill, in a twilight moment, in a young girl’s memory,
in a young boy’s dream, in a silent kiss between two souls that seemed to stitch together in time and space. For love is still there. I am still there. Filling up that space with significance.
And as long as that space is still there,
so are we.